


the sky won't snow (and the sun won't shine)

by AlexSeanchai



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Episode: s03 Desperada, Gen, Light Angst, Panic Attacks, Podfic Welcome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 07:28:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20560523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlexSeanchai/pseuds/AlexSeanchai
Summary: Adrien failed her. Why won't she believe that?





	the sky won't snow (and the sun won't shine)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LoveGeek15](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoveGeek15/gifts).

Adrien slouched among the trees lining Place des Vosges, kicking a pebble along in front of him and wondering how much longer before he didn't have a choice about going home. He didn't have to count seconds. He _didn't_. He didn't have to count loops. She was alive and she'd stay that way and he didn't _have to_, and the bright afternoon breeze was nothing like the Paris sewer.

A pebble bounced off the dirt a meter ahead of him. Another.

Adrien looked up.

Ladybug was perched in the tree branches, beckoning him up with a hopeful look.

What could she possibly want to talk to _Adrien_ about? He kicked the pebble again.

She threw another.

"What?" Adrien grumbled without stopping.

"You know what would be really nice right now?" Ladybug said above him. "A hug."

"Why?"

"—I mean, if you don't want one," Ladybug said, suddenly far more hesitant. "Sounds like I put you through hell. I wouldn't blame you for wanting me to stay away."

Adrien halted. "Who the what now?"

"I did the math, Adrien. Please come up here?"

…Fine.

Ladybug hooked her yo-yo around a branch, dropped to the ground, and held out her other arm. Adrien embraced her, and she lifted them back into the tree's crown.

"At least eighteen days," she said quietly, once they were settled on separate branches. "Maybe almost ninety. Probably more like fifty to seventy. And I don't know if any of that was rest breaks, but none of those could be long."

Every couple hundred chances, he'd taken four minutes forty-five seconds to sit with closed eyes, or to hug her close. But no, it hadn't been restful.

"I don't know what that did to you physique-y," she continued, and caught herself: "—_physically_! physiologically!—but I bet it sucks, whatever it is. And there's no way it didn't do anything to your mind or your heart."

Someone in the school courtyard yesterday had gotten an incoming call. Their ringtone was ten seconds of (he must have googled at some point, probably because it was bothering him so much not to know) Johnny Cash's 'Ring of Fire'. _Love is a burning thing, and it makes a fiery ring,_ with trumpet riffs between phrases. The only thing he remembered with any clarity from that first morning break to after midnight was that no one had been in any real danger; that he would have noticed, and that, even as dizzy and shaky and numb as he'd felt all day, he would have done something about.

"I'm fine."

Ladybug sighed. "Please don't lie to me."

"I'm not."

"…If you say so." She paused. "Please don't blame yourself, either."

Adrien shook his head, staring at the ground meters below him. "I screwed up. I wasn't as good as you needed."

"No. _I_ got it wrong. I can't—do this at random, Adrien."

He couldn't see how she was feeling.

"If I gave Carapace the Fox Miraculous," she continued, "it wouldn't work very well, because he's the wrong kind of determined. He's like a mountain, which works great with the Turtle, because Turtles have to dig their heels in all _no, I will not be moved_. But the Fox needs more like—like a forest fire. Ground fires can smolder for ages and no one notices until suddenly everything's blazing. Carapace isn't that good at subtle."

"Should you be telling me this?" Adrien wondered. Chat Noir had heard something of the sort, but in less detail, and of course being Monsieur Bug had thoroughly proven he couldn't do what she did.

"If I can't trust you to keep a secret, Adrien, we're already in deep trouble."

True on more levels than she knew. (_Adrien_ knew Viperion's name. _Chat Noir_ was apparently supposed to assume Adrien himself was Viperion, having asked Sass for a serious makeover.) "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I don't know how to fix anything else I did wrong that day, but if you could stop beating yourself up because _I_ didn't realize that wouldn't suit you, that would be perfect."

Adrien glanced over. She had almost the same expression she'd had when she was offering him the bracelet to begin with—only then she'd seemed a lot more hopeful and not at all sad.

"I'm not really sure which would," she mused, and Adrien, eyes back on the dirt, said "Don't."

"—Sorry?"

"Don't try to figure out which I should get next."

Maybe it _was_ that it simply wasn't possible for Ladybug and a Snake wielder to do what Ladybug, Chat Noir, and a Snake wielder had accomplished. He still wasn't sure he believed that, but he remembered how grouchy she'd been every time Chat Noir had had to ditch her for a few minutes so she or someone else could speak to Adrien face to face. He'd _seen_ her expression each of the twenty-nine times Aspik's words or Plagg's had betrayed his identity to her.

He sure as hell didn't want to tell her now.

"I don't want another Miraculous."

_I know you can do this,_ Ladybug had told him, one hundred twenty-seven times said however many ways. _I believe in you._

After the twenty-five thousand nine hundred thirteenth snap back, he hadn't given her the chance to speak. She would have, and he would have believed her, and he would have _kept going_—

And how long before the three hundredth second ticked by?

How long before there was no preventing his failure?

"I don't want to fail you again."

(It didn't happen. None of it had ever happened.)

"…Are you sure you don't want a hug?"

He wasn't; he did. "I'm sure."

"All right." She didn't sound like it was. "You want to get down?"

"…please."

Ladybug hopped over to his branch and embraced him long enough to make the jump to the ground.

"Take care of yourself," she told him.

Adrien nodded.

* * *

Chat Noir met Ladybug that evening for their irregularly scheduled 'let's go parkour around the city and pretend we're being responsible superheroes' event that they'd told Alya at some early point they called 'patrol'. She looked miserable; she hadn't said when she texted _why_ she wanted to patrol tonight, but it was probably the same reason.

"You okay there, my Lady?"

She shook her head. "People I care about being idiots and not listening to me even a little, and I still don't have Hawkmoth's head on a plate."

Chat Noir snorted. "Yeah, I hear that. Hey, what did one plate say to the other?"

Ladybug gave him a flat look.

"Dinner is on me!"

She bounced her yo-yo off his head and took off. "Tag!" she shouted back, and Chat Noir swore and followed.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [Dreamwidth](https://alexseanchai.dreamwidth.org/) and [Tumblr](https://alexseanchai.tumblr.com/).


End file.
